1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to practice equipment for the martial arts and, more particularly, to a novel karate practice board for hand and foot strikes.
2. The Prior Art
Karate practitioners frequently break wooden boards or like members in order to develop and demonstrate powerful hand and foot strikes. One board or a stack of boards is supported at its opposite edges, generally with its grain running parallel to these edges, and is struck medially by the foot or the hand. If the strike is sufficiently powerful and properly executed, the board or boards will break in two. In the past, boards thus broken have been discarded. Since a typical karate practitioner thus may destroy many boards each day, as many as 10, 2.5 centimeter thick boards at a single blow, karate practice can be unduly expensive. Also wooden boards tend to vary unpredictably in their resistance to severing force so that, in the past, the karate practitioner has had no calibrated gauge of the force he is capable of delivering.